We were not exactly unwelcome at the camps we visited—that would be unthinkable on the playa—but nor were we greeted with smiles when, following co-ordinates recorded on a GPS unit, we pulled up at a previously cited camp, with our clipboards and cameras, and began asking the dazed, stoned, half-dressed inhabitants who was in charge. Our hugs, exchanged without eye-contact, had all the mutual warmth of a policeman’s handshake. Invariably the oil-drippers or grey-water leakers had done nothing to address the issue since they had been warned about it the previous day (had probably in fact quite forgotten) and so we could only tell them, with another hot hug, that if the problem had not been addressed when another pair of Earth Guardians returned tomorrow they would be cited for a second time, which would mean involving the Bureau of Land Management, which effectively meant the cops. As we trundled away over the playa, the people we had just hugged farewell would watch us go and Acumen would wave and holler, “We love you guys! Thank you so much!” and they in turn would raise a hand, but silently, and I would watch Acumen’s face relax into unsmilingness.
It went on like that, from street to street, for the rest of the morning, until, shortly before noon, a dust storm hit, and after driving blind for a minute Acumen pulled to a halt, the GPS having gone haywire. We sat there in our goggles in the stifling whiteout. “We’ve not seen as many camps as we should have,” she said, flicking through the documents on her clipboard. “If we don’t follow up, they’ll just go on infringing, and we don’t want that, do we?” The dust cleared for a moment up ahead, and it was possible to see a giant set of comedy teeth trundling away, and two women wearing nothing but dragonfly wings walking hand in hand, and behind them a man in his sixties in Bermuda shorts and a Stetson, who I told myself might be Larry Harvey. “We’re done,” Acumen was saying, as the dust closed in once more. “If anyone asks, I’ll blame you for slowing us down.” I looked across at her in her goggles; she wasn’t smiling.
* * *
—
I WOULD OFTEN cycle out to the Man at dawn to enjoy the sun and look at him standing on his platform, eighteen metres tall, the city’s static centre. To enjoy the relative tranquillity, too. The Man was omphalos and landmark, axis mundi, colossus and idol, but his main purpose was to be destroyed. With his tapered limbs and inverted-triangle head he was a caveman’s drawing. At night, outlined in green neon, he was reduced to a logo. And in two dimensions—in text messages and on Twitter—he was simply two brackets and an apostrophe:
)’(
The Man was stuffed with burlap soaked in wax. The night before he was due to be burnt, fireworks and explosives would be packed in. Guyed to the ground, the Man was guarded twenty-four hours a day by a detachment of Black Rock Rangers. A few years ago, on a Tuesday afternoon five days before the Man was due to be set alight, smoke was noticed coming from its base. The Man was put out by firefighters before he was destroyed, but still he had to be dismantled and taken down from his platform. The person responsible for setting the fire was a San Francisco playwright named Paul Addis, a long-time Burner unhappy about Burning Man’s loss of spontaneity. “This was not an act of vengeance,” he said, “it was one of love.” Radical self-expression. The Man was rebuilt by the Black Rock Rangers and, five days later, burnt as scheduled. And yet the Man’s temporary absence from the city’s centre, I was told, had somehow sapped the participants’ spirit, as if a cult’s idol had been abducted. Addis, meanwhile, had been arrested by Pershing County police and would be charged with arson, destruction of property and reckless endangerment of human life, and sentenced to two years in prison. Three years after his release he killed himself.
In the early 1990s, when numbers were still in the low thousands, you were free to wander where you liked on the playa, and firearms were commonplace. There had been a “drive-by shooting range” where soft toys were lined up as targets. Cars were allowed and people had been mown down in their tents and horribly injured, and light aircraft had crash-landed (Black Rock City now had its own airstrip, overseen by the Federal Aviation Authority). As the city grew, year by year, the available liberties became fewer, but still today Harvey’s ten principles are enforced, and the taboo against advertising and other commercial exploitation remains.
I sometimes reread the warning on my ticket: “Risk of serious injury or death.” That was partly the point of coming, of course. But what was surprising, given the number of intoxicated young people, and the heat and the sun, and all the bodged-together scaffold towers and gantries, and the mutant vehicles spewing fire, was that, while there was an onsite hospital, there was not a morgue. As far as I knew, only one person had died this year, and he’d had a heart attack. In recent years there had been a scattering of deaths: someone had been killed disembarking from a mutant vehicle, someone had died after deliberately running into a fire, someone had been killed in a plane crash and someone had, somehow, hanged himself in his tent. For a city of more than seventy thousand, the crime rate, excluding drugs offences, was tiny, and violence almost unheard of. The only aggression I witnessed was on the penultimate night, the night the Man burnt, when it seemed like all the generosity and acceptance of the previous week was caused to evaporate.
* * *
—
AFTER THE OPENING Sunday I quickly lost track of the days. My notebook entries are not chronological but written randomly from the back or the front or the middle, upside down and sideways. I don’t always recognise the hand as mine, and often what I have written is illegible or just nonsense. It might, then, have been the next day or the one after, or later, when, sitting in a camp chair spritzing a water-mister into my face, I saw a low cloud carouselling slowly across the playa a kilometre away.
It resolved into two finer threads, whirlwinds, dust devils, willy-willies, which appeared to circle one another, like two figures dancing or fencing. It was a desert phenomenon I had seen before, these miniature updraughts, but nowhere else had the contrast with the horizontal been so extreme. According to Mildred Cable, the Gobi dust devils invariably came like this, in couples, the “male” partner spinning clockwise, the “female” anticlockwise. Naturally they were to be understood as kwei, demons. “The best for the demon,” Cable was told, “is when a living human will let himself be possessed.” I stood up and watched them and then found my bike and cycled towards the open playa. One—I couldn’t say if it was male or female—had stretched by the time I reached the Esplanade, like clay drawn thin on a potter’s wheel, sucking up more dust, and it was now two hundred metres tall, gyrating with what seemed to me a joyous plasticity, and I began to hear woahs and fucks as I passed others who’d spotted it. Once I was out of the built city and on the open playa I accelerated, heading towards the larger dust devil as quickly as I could, only to see it wash across the trash fence and out beyond the site, where, deprived of the dust thrown up within the city, it dissolved. Its smaller counterpart was moving more slowly, and I found I could catch up with it and cycle after it at a leisurely pace. But while it was possible to stalk it from a distance of ten metres or so, if you got much closer it became faint against the sky, and if you stood directly under it, in its tail, only a shapeshifting smoke-ring was visible when you looked up, a ghost flourish, and on the ground the faintest of shadows.
Far from anywhere, a three-metre square of playa had been cordoned off with orange tape, and within this sector three people were on their hands and knees, hatless in the afternoon blaze, scrupulously sweeping up dust with dustpan and brush and tipping the dust into a sack. That it was pointless was the point. When full, the sack of dust was carried a few metres and emptied onto the playa and spread about with a rake. Once this was done, the stakes and cordon marking the swept sector were removed and the three sweepers walked some distance until they apparently agreed on a new location, then re-established the cordon and resumed their work. I was the only spectator, but when I walked away, I looked back and saw that they were still at it. S
omewhere, I’d been told, there was a playa-dust vending machine. You were constantly being asked, excitedly, had you seen this or that grand absurdity—the Buddhist stupa, the caviar emporium, the other La Mancha’s camp, “the guy with two pricks” (him again)—and invariably you hadn’t; and the effect was that the already bewildering multiplicity of your own daily experience was infinitely magnified, so that the city began to feel like a place where not only anything could happen, but where everything was happening, and indeed must happen.
I spent what seemed like hours following the dust devil—time was harder to keep track of—as it guided me from one side of the city to another, seeming to wait until I caught up again and finally leading me to a beautiful vehicle formed of taut white sails, from whose deck a naked man was lobbing something from a box to a cheering crowd—ice lollies! Cast, it turned out, from a dildo; but no, actually, not a dildo! someone said, the man’s own member. “You!” the man called, pointing at me. “You want it! I can tell you want it!” and he arced one into the air and it landed in the dust by my front wheel. A beautiful black woman in a tricorn, Spirit of Fornication, picked it up, licked the dust from it, and handed it to me. “I’m sorry,” she said, with a grave little bow, “the head snapped off.” It was okay. It was delicious. I rode on, leaving the group of men and women, and a child in his mother’s arms, all happily licking their lollies, and out past the man—the Man—and when I had finished my cock-lolly and was wondering where to put the stick, I looked ahead and there was the Temple.
* * *
—
IF THE AXIS MUNDI was the Man, its counterpoint at the city’s margin was the Temple. The innermost point of the horseshoe-shaped Esplanade—at “six o’clock”—is known as the keyhole, a symbolic threshold between the city and the playa. From it a straight promenade flanked with ornate lampposts leads to the Man on his platform eight hundred metres away. Follow that line past the Man and you’ll reach the Temple site eventually. Beyond the Temple is an expanse of nothing, then the outer fence, then the world.
The Temple was emerging from the dust. This year it was a spiral tunnel, a curling lobster-pot more than sixty metres long and perhaps twenty tall at its entrance, narrowing as you moved from the mouth towards the tail. It resembled an architect’s simplified computer model. Hundreds of people could be passing through it at any one time. A certain emotional etiquette was observed: the mutant vehicles kept away, there was no pounding trance music and less nudity. It was ringed by the parked bicycles of those inside. From a distance it was a delicate filigree against the monumentality of the desert. But when you got close it was simple, even crude, like the ribcage of some leviathan dug from the bed of old Lake Lahontan. The arching ribs, laddered together with timber struts, grew narrower as you went deeper. Once you entered, it was too crowded to back out.
The first temple (the design changed each year) had been built in 2000, just another of that year’s hundreds of Burning Man artworks. During the course of its construction, one of the builders, a thirty-three-year-old named Michael Hefflin, was killed in a motorcycle accident. The remaining builders, shocked and grieving, decided to continue. The temple when it was completed was dedicated to their friend, and a shrine to his memory was placed within. Those who entered were encouraged to leave messages and tributes, to Hefflin or whomever they chose. The following year the Temple was given its official site by the Burning Man organisers, and along with the Man and the Esplanade and the keyhole and the trash fence, it became part of Black Rock City’s cosmology. There was little music here, just some chanting; inside, there was conversation, hushed, and there was intermittent weeping. The occasional louder cry.
“Put your right hand out, that’s the person who committed suicide, alone and agonised. Put your left hand close to you. That’s the child who died of leukaemia, surrounded by love and support. Now, move the two hands together and lift them. In this way, those who died amid love will help liberate those who died in anguish.” This was David Best, the artist who oversaw the Temple’s construction each year. The atmosphere was funereal, and the crowd’s pace was that of a military cortege. There was something about it too of the meat-grinder. The deeper you went into the Temple’s throat and the thickening crowd, the harder it became not to weep, though to have done so, I felt, would have been to throw myself off a precipice. You processed into the narrowing tunnel, the weeping becoming louder, the wooden ribs dense with scrawled messages and artefacts of sorrow and remembrance and regret pinned and tied on, ribbons and prayer flags flapping in the wind, photos of the dead, letters to the dead; the toddler dead in a lake, the lover dead on the highway, the sister who killed herself and the fiancé shot by police; the beloved cat or dog. Fuck you, cancer, I will defeat you. Fuck you to my stepmother. Fuck you for raping your son. Please free my sister from drugs.
Bring your scorn, test it as the tunnel constricts and the weeping young people lie shuddering on the ground around you. And then be released into the dazzling whiteness, where you will find a two-metre-tall teddy bear, who will take you in his arms.
* * *
—
THE EXPLORER JULES REMY, travelling in the Great Basin in 1855, describes the malady that overcomes one of his party, a former sailor named George: “It seemed,” he writes, “as though the desert had paralysed him. He was incapable of thought.” Poor George. When I was ailing—recrudescent accidie, let’s call it—Brocket took me to a tent a few streets out from the Gayborhood, where two industrial fans blew ice-cold vapour onto you as you danced. I stayed there, a foot from one of the fans, performing a side-to-side camel-shuffle, sucking on the catheter of my CamelBak, eyes closed into the freezing white, until I could not feel my face. Then a tap on the shoulder and we were off; off ice-headed to the next block, where a white ball twenty metres in diameter bobbed, grounded against its tethers.
It was called the Moon. There was a queue; many of the queuers were dressed as dogs. To enter, you had to crawl through a hole at ground level, following someone’s tail. And then, when you were inside, it was a new kind of nowhere, the intense sunlight diffused by the walls of the ball, which was really more of a balloon, kept inflated with industrial fans, its underside flat against the ground. The pressure was heightened, you could feel it in your ears. There were dozens of people here, most of them sitting around the edge of the circle, against the wall of the sphere or near-sphere, but some gathered in the centre, playing bongos and singing, enjoying the peculiar abrupt echo that was experienced at that particular point. There were three of them, the bongos-player and another man and a woman, skinny and tanned and dreadlocked, and the woman was leading, improvising a song about Burning Man, about Burners and our beauty, and the beauty of dust, which was the dust of life, life that was only dust, which was beautiful, and the crowd gathered around the edge of the sphere began to clap along, enjoying the blunted acoustic, and the guy with the bongos walked around and handed them to someone, who took over the playing, and then passed them on to someone else, who continued. It didn’t matter if they were any good. Brocket, dressed as an orange, pranced around the singer for a while and then lay down on his back beside her, with his head close to her, and began to harmonise, harmonise so sweetly, beginning quietly, carefully, then descending to the lowest of baritones, not singing anything in particular, just articulating sounds, moving the notes around in his mouth and his throat and chest, ah and ooh, apparently without taking a single breath, relishing the resonance, the volume of his accompaniment growing until his voice, with a laugh, overwhelmed that of the woman (who was delighted), and seemed to fill up the entire vessel, this swooning, swimming plainsong that was at once foghorn and soprano’s cry out into the fog, and those of us gathered around joined in, not only clapping but singing with him, and some of us danced in couples, with a certain courtly formality, in the space between the walls and the musicians, and it seemed to go on for hours, this languid singing and dancing, for hours as more
people slipped in through that narrow diaphragm, and the brightness inside seemed to intensify.
* * *
—
I MET AMY at the Earth Guardians camp on the fifth morning. She was from Portland: arch, gently mocking, and it seemed to me glowing with the wellbeing that comes from being constantly loved. Bathing in the hot springs on the edge of the playa had once been part of Burning Man, in the days before the fence; but no longer. Amy and I were being deployed by the Earth Guardians ostensibly to guard these sensitive environments against any Burners who either found them on the way to or from Black Rock City, or somehow escaped during the course of the week. Not that any of these eventualities seemed likely when the spot was many kilometres from the nearest sealed road and even further from the external fence, meaning that in order to reach it any Burner would have to cross not only twenty-five kilometres of shadeless playa, but somehow evade the authorities who were sentried in their Land Cruisers along the perimeter.
A Black Rock Ranger drove us beyond the trash fence across the playa, accelerating until her minivan would go no faster. As we left the city behind at 150 kilometres per hour, you could gain a sense of the vastness of its setting, this monstrous basin filled four thousand metres deep with compacted gravel and dust. The city seemed enormous when you were within it, seemed everything, but it was nothing. We had driven for just ten minutes and Burning Man and its seventy thousand souls were gone; you could come here from the north and never know the event was happening. The playa, just a couple of kilometres away from the trash fence, was oblivious.
The Immeasurable World Page 28